The Edges Are Still Sharp in Brooklyn

Lena Dunham’s ‘Girls’ Returns to HBO

Lena Dunham in "Girls," which returns to HBO on Sunday.Credit
Jessica Miglio/HBO

Back when networks reigned supreme, cable television was the place to go for sex and violence. Now it’s also a safe house for pessimism, an alternate universe where problems fester or deepen, friends let one another down, and love doesn’t conquer anything.

And that’s particularly hard for American comedy, which is addicted to redemption and happy endings, so much so that one of the better network sitcoms on ABC at the moment is actually called “Happy Endings.” (That title may suggest to some a salacious double entendre, but the episodes do close on a warm, cheery note.) There is clever writing on even some of the most anodyne sitcoms, but it’s still almost impossible to find a network series that doesn’t celebrate the sunny side of human weakness.

And that’s why “Girls,” which returns to HBO on Sunday, is such a phenomenon. For the seven readers who haven’t heard of it or its 26-year-old wunderkind creator, Lena Dunham, “Girls” is a dark and deadpan comedy about four young women in Brooklyn who don’t own cool apartments or have glamorous careers, eligible suitors, expensive clothes or even, sometimes, paying jobs. Ms. Dunham plays the heroine, Hannah, and she isn’t always likable. “Girls” may be the millennial generation’s rebuttal to “Sex and the City,” but the first season was at times as cruelly insightful and bleakly funny as “Louie” on FX or “Curb Your Enthusiasm” on HBO.

There is lots of good television, but comedies that are fresh and original as well as rigorously downbeat are harder to find — particularly when it comes to the depiction of women in their 20s. “Girls” drew so many accolades and so much media attention — Internet champions, television appearances, magazine covers and a multimillion-dollar book deal for Ms. Dunham — that it quickly started a backlash that was as disproportionate as all the initial fuss. So the measure of Season 2 lies in how well Ms. Dunham and her colleagues withstood all the pressure and stayed true to the original conceit.

The first episode is a little slow, but the next three are as irreverent, funny and hard edged as any in the first season. There are some adjustments for success, including cameo roles for celebrities like Rita Wilson. But the seditious, satirical spirit is intact.

Defiance too is evident between the lines. To her credit Ms. Dunham did not wilt under the impassioned blogger debate over her not-thin physique, which she flaunted by having Hannah flit around in ever more revealing displays of near-nakedness. Nudity doesn’t shock viewers, but imperfection does. This season, the F.C.C. may have to issue a special rating for fashion-obsessed audiences (TV-Not-a-Size-6), because Hannah is, if anything, even less inhibited about her body.

Last year some critics got traction with complaints that none of Ms. Dunham’s main characters were African-American — even though the cast is small, and mostly made up of insular, middle-class Oberlin alumni living in bohemian Brooklyn. Ms. Dunham dealt with the diversity dust-up by giving in — to a point. Her character returns to the screen with a sort-of boyfriend, Sandy (Donald Glover of “Community”), a good-humored, hip black law student who happens to be a Republican. Hannah can’t believe he actually likes her, but she also can’t believe he is actually a conservative.

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As the HBO trailer reveals, it’s raining men, at least for Hannah. She is still entangled with her bad boyfriend, Adam, and also shares her apartment with an ex-boyfriend, Elijah (Andrew Rannells), who is now gay and her new best friend. They are smugly in sync, at times nauseatingly so, until they aren’t. Friendships are vital on “Girls,” but that doesn’t mean they are friendly.

Marnie (Allison Williams), Hannah’s beautiful, strait-laced best friend, moved out, and now finds herself unmoored without a roommate, a boyfriend or a job. Her anxiety hardens her looks, a toll that her mother, played by Ms. Wilson, is only too happy to point out. When Marnie barks back, her mother complains that Marnie doesn’t speak to her friends in that tone. “I talk to my friends way worse than this,” Marnie says.

Marnie’s fierce manner clashes with her all-American beauty and good breeding. But it’s her shocked response to the first intimations of failure that sets her apart the most. Many in her circle are unemployed, depressed or drifting, but she is stunned at her fate, and rightly so, because women like her are not supposed to be discounted and ignored. Her closest friends don’t provide much help or sympathy, assuring her that she could get a “pretty-person job.”

And the others in the foursome are just as complicated. Even Shoshanna (Zosia Mamet), who talks in women’s magazine self-help prattle (at one point she thanks the “higher powers” for her gifts, which she describes to herself as a “keen mathematical mind and fairly fast-growing hair”), is endearing without stepping over the line into sitcom cuteness. Jessa (Jemima Kirke) is both knowing and hilariously self-deluded, a freeloading free spirit who is pathetic and admirable all at once.

Ms. Dunham has created a narrow world that looks very much like the one she lives in for real, but it is so sharply drawn that it has broad appeal.

A version of this article appears in print on January 11, 2013, on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: The Edges Are Still Sharp In Brooklyn. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe